


what ghosts there do remain

by thatsparrow



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, spoilers for 2.15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-28 17:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12611456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/pseuds/thatsparrow
Summary: He's dressed up sharp like he's wearing his Duke Rose disguise, matchstick pinched between those slender fingertips built for running sleight-of-hand grifts (or skating velvet-tipped over skin and isn'tthata feeling Juno remembers well), and there's a dot of flame dancing near the crescents of his nails that's throwing flickering shadows over his face and reflecting orange pinpricks in the flat edges of his glasses."Nureyev?"





	what ghosts there do remain

**Author's Note:**

> a narrativized (and slightly altered) version of the dream sequence during the open of _juno steel and the promised land (part 2)_
> 
> (because I loved that moment a whole lot but something about the way juno asked, "it's you, right? peter nureyev?" like they'd met once and were now running into each other years later at the grocery store just hit me in the wrong way, and so I wanted to try writing my own take on the scene)
> 
> title from "july, july" by the decemberists

It's dark enough when Juno wakes that he starts worrying for a panicked second he's lost whatever sight he had left in his living eye and the Thea's circuits shorted out for good. And he can't figure where the _hell_ he is — can't figure much beyond the curtain of black that's thick and unbroken as the pockets of space beyond the stars, solid enough to sit on his shoulders and chest with a weight like late-summer humidity. But Juno's been playing the PI game long enough to know fear's a faster shortcut to failure than making a one-way trip into the horizon of the Martian desert, and so he shoves back that gut-punch panic reflex and focuses on all the things he knows about his surroundings instead of all the things he doesn't — focuses on the feel of pitted cement beneath his fingertips and pebbles digging into the callused skin of his palms and the blessed familiar weight of a blaster buckled against his hip.

So he's armed, at least, and already that means he's been in worse scrapes than this.

He's just shifting himself off his palms and onto his knees when he hears the sharp echo of footsteps on stone, each one a brittle _click_ and moving steadily in Juno's direction.

"Pilot?" He throws out into the dark, the word edged like a challenge as he pulls himself to his feet and settles a hand on the grip of his gun. "Don't try anything, Pereyra. I'm armed and you're out of your element." It feels like half a lie as soon as he says it — someone shady as Pereyra must have gotten used to skulking through shadows darker than these.

But it's not Pilot's voice of steel coated in silk that answers Juno's call, and the one that does is unexpected enough to threaten sending him right back to his knees.

"Oh, Juno, I know we've grown apart, but far enough to shoot me?" Nureyev laughs, and Juno swears he can hear sharpened teeth in the sound. "No, I don't think so."

And it's impossible, and Juno _knows_ it's impossible, and he's ready to start sending laser blasts at whatever bullshit Pereyra's cooked up when there's the sizzling _snap_ of a struck match and the firework flare of a flame springing into life. There are spots of bright white burned into the space behind Juno's eyelids, retinas stinging enough to convince him he hasn't gone blind when his vision finally adjusts and he sees Nureyev standing in front of him, silhouette carved out of the shadows. He's dressed up sharp like he's wearing his Duke Rose disguise, matchstick pinched between those slender fingertips built for running sleight-of-hand grifts (or skating velvet-tipped over skin and isn't _that_ a feeling Juno remembers well), and there's a dot of flame dancing near the crescents of his nails that's throwing flickering shadows over his face and reflecting orange pinpricks in the flat edges of his glasses.

"Nureyev?"

Juno would be embarrassed at whatever unguarded look of naive hope he's _sure_ he's wearing if the light from the match wasn't dim enough to keep most of his face in shadow. Hell, the almost-pleading tone in his voice is bad enough as it is, pulling back the curtain a little too far on the messy Nureyev-related emotions Juno shoved to the corners of a backroom closet so many months ago.

Then Nureyev tilts his head, shifting the glint off his glasses enough that Juno catches sight of his irises for the first time. Granted, it's been months since he and Nureyev last crossed paths (call it a lie or self-protection that Juno waters down that sentiment as much as he does) but there's nothing familiar about the look he's seeing now in Nureyev's eyes — this steel-sharp edge like a high-noon sun slanting off the barrel of a blaster.

In retrospect, Juno should've known something was off as soon as Nureyev came close enough for Juno to trace out the curves of his eyelashes and couldn't catch a whisper of that damn cologne.

"Hm... _Nureyev_?" He says finally, asking a question that's not really a question, lending this mocking tone to his words that cuts Juno sharper than the points of the Piranha's teeth. "No, I don't think I recall that name."

"Hell, fine," Juno says, papering over his confusion with frustration and praying that hides the current of fear in his voice. "Rex Glass or Duke Rose or whatever goddamn alias you're going by these days — it's _you_. Quit it with the bullshit, I _know_ it's you."

Nureyev keeps his words buttoned behind a thin smile and Juno fists his fingers into white-knuckled grips to keep them from trembling.

"How funny, and yet I can't say I recall ever meeting _you_. Refresh my memory, Detective. Remind me why I should find you familiar."

And Juno's thankful for nothing more in this moment than that the match is held up to Nureyev's face instead of his own — thankful beyond words for the fact that Nureyev can't see the rigid set of Juno's jaw and the lines of tension ratcheted through the muscles of his shoulders. Would offer up prayers of gratitude to any god listening that Nureyev can't see the brief flash of hurt that slips into the lines of Juno's face for a brief faltering moment.

Somewhere, dimly, Juno registers the fact that the matchstick flame hasn't burned any closer to the tips of Nureyev's fingers, and later he'll realize that should've been a giveaway, too.

"I don't have time for whatever game you're trying to play, _Peter_ ," Juno says, burying the frostbite pain of Nureyev's words and that last guilty memory of Nureyev tangled in sheets under a layer of trademarked Juno Steel cynicism. "You called me 'detective', so _don't_ —"

(Except the memories are there even if he doesn't want them, even if he's spent the last few months doing nothing more than trying to _forget_. Peter's glasses sitting on the nightstand, all sharp black angles where Peter's built of languid curves. Tracing out the curve of Peter's cheek with the pad of his thumb, velvet soft against his own rough calluses. Tangling his hands in the hair at the nape of Peter's neck, palms resting on that smooth column of unbroken skin. Peter learning the constellation of scars littering Juno's chest, first with his fingertips, then with his mouth.

Peter, sleeping, all soft edges in the fragments of dawn light slipping between the curtains, a curl of black hair sitting on his forehead like a comma and one arm stretched out towards Juno's side of the bed.

Juno's own vista from the doorframe, seeing Peter's hand resting on nothing but a strip of white sheet and the empty stretch of mattress he'd left behind.)

"—just...don't," Juno finishes, suddenly feeling too weary and ten different kinds of bruised. "Whatever's going on, whatever the hell it is you're trying to pull, I don't have time for it. Don't act like you don't know who I am."

"Am I supposed to?" Nureyev asks, and Juno doesn't know what to do with the bite he's hearing in Nureyev's words. "Do you really think you're so important?"

"No— _hell_ —that's not what I—"

"I called you 'detective' because you reminded me of someone I knew, once. He had the same awful posture and permanent scowl and scar bridged across his nose, and I suppose I was feeling nostalgic. We haven't seen each other in quite some time, and there's almost enough of you to bear a passing resemblance." Nureyev's tone is relentlessly level and Juno can't help but note the irony in how it's sending him off-balance. "I thought I saw something similar in you, and look how shamefully wrong I was. He turned Hyperion on its ear where you're just a paper doll. A has-been." Nureyev's eyes narrow, flicking over pointedly at the gunmetal-gray curves of the Thea in Juno's right socket. "A cyclops that _thinks_ he's a private eye."

"The hell are you talking about?"

Nureyev doesn't answer, but tilts his head and gives Juno this look verging too close to pity. Like he doesn't need to say a damn thing when Juno's words are proving his point for him.

"You know what? Go ahead, call me whatever you want." Juno lets out a bitter laugh. "I'll be the first to admit I deserve it." And because Juno loves nothing better than punishing himself, he wonders for one awful moment if Nureyev is thinking about the morning he woke up to find himself alone — wonders what Peter must have thought of him _then_ , what words would have been sitting on his tongue. "I know I've been reeling for months, know I've just been pinballing from one disaster to the next and fighting to keep my head above the water while Pereyra and the Piranha and every other damn rotten thing in this city keep dragging me under the surface, but all that's almost _over_ , understand? I am _this_ goddamn close to busting the mayor of this goddamn city, and once I do, Hyperion's never gonna be the same. Nobody is _ever_ going to get hurt the way Pilot's trying to hurt them now, Nureyev, and I'm gonna make sure of it."

"It certainly seems that way, just as you _seem_ to be Juno Steel. And yet—"

"Dammit, stop talking in riddles! I _am_ Juno Steel."

" _No_ , you _aren't_ ," Nureyev snaps, anger flaring up in his words for the first time like the matchstick's orange-tipped flame rearing up from the shadows. "You'd like to think you are, but I _know_ Juno Steel. I saw something in him — something bright and persistent and still untarnished after laboring for years among the dregs of the city. Juno Steel burned with a spark and I followed it like a magnet, because, frankly, after encountering it once, I couldn't do anything but keep it in sight. But you?" He takes a step closer towards Juno, and it's some new effort of will not to shrink back from scalding edge of disappointment in Nureyev's words. "You're a _dog_."

"What?"

"No — less dignified even than that." The hand not holding the match reaches up rattlesnake-quick, slender fingers gripping iron-tight on Juno's chin and tilting his head up towards the light. "A dog might allow a collar onto his neck, but you? Oh, Detective—and I'm not sure that title even still applies—you fashioned yours of metal and fastened it around your brain and let the leash run out your eye. You gave up the lead to the first hand that offered you food and now you've bought into the fantasy enough to convince yourself it's freedom."

"Stop it, Nureyev," Juno says, quiet, fighting to keep his eyes fixed on Nureyev's instead of dropping his stare down to his shoes — to implicitly admit there might be some truth in those biting words.

"I've tried to tell you, Juno dearest," Nureyev says after another beat, letting his grip on Juno's chin soften until his fingers rest feather-light on the skin, one thumb sweeping out a line along the curve of Juno's jaw, "but alas, I am _not_ Peter Nureyev."

"Of course you are—"

"Juno, think for a moment — where are you?"

"The—"

(And his first thought is that goddamn tomb buried below the sands of Mars where he and Nureyev spent so many anxious and broken nights, beaten down by Miasma and seeking some solace in one another in that half-shadowed place where time turned something meaningless. But the tomb was _months_ ago, and so was Nureyev's empty bed, and weeks of fruitless investigations and meeting Ramses and stumbling into Pereyra's scheme and—)

"—subway," Juno finishes after a pause, the memory rushing back clear enough he wonders how he could have forgotten. "That pod, on the way to the Free Dome, trying to bag Pilot and the Piranha."

"And who is with you?"

"You, obviously," Juno snaps — because what kind of question is that when Nureyev's close enough for Juno to watch the rise and fall of his chest, to feel the warm and insistent weight of Nureyev's fingertips on his skin?

But then he stops, and he thinks, because he hasn't seen Nureyev since he walked away from that night like a coward, and so Nureyev couldn't be with him all these many months later in the snaking Martian subway tunnels. And when he thinks back, it's not Nureyev's catlike grace and easy smile he remembers at his side, but relentless practicality wrapped up with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, and that can only be—

"Strong," Juno finishes, letting out a slow exhale as the memories come back. "I came down here with—" he breaks off, frowning as his eyes fish through the black and come up with nothing but more shadows. "Where the hell is Alessandra?"

He looks back at Nureyev, who offers no explanation but this small, sad smile, and Juno knows how to read that as his answer.

"This...isn't the pod, is it?" He says at last, shaking his head at himself that he didn't catch on sooner. "And it's not the Free Dome, either. This is just—"

"A dream."

"A dream," Juno echoes, nodding his understanding as Nureyev's fingers slip from his skin and fall back to his side. And now he knows that none of this is real, and that the Nureyev standing in front of him isn't really Nureyev at all, but some fever dream of Juno's guilty conscience. And so he can't offer any kind of absolution for the shame Juno's been carrying ever since he walked away, but— _hell_ —he'll take whatever he can get if this moment is the closest he'll come to penance.

"Nureyev, I feel like I messed up. I can't decide...I just—" he breaks off, shame rising in his throat to choke his words, "—keep thinking about that night, and there was this second in the doorway and it lasted a damn _eternity_ , and I feel like part of me is still there—"

"This is all very sweet, dear Detective," Nureyev says, "but we both know this isn't the time." The tone in his words isn't harsh and unforgiving, but gentle, and slightly chiding, and Juno figures it's no worse than he deserves. By now, he remembers enough about the stand-off he left behind in the sealed subway car, and the coin-flip outcome deciding his and Alessandra's success or failure, and he knows Peter's not being unfair.

And then Peter douses the match with a small shake of his fingers, and Juno would complain about not being able to see his face anymore, except then he feels Peter's hands settle sure and deliberate on the sides of his face and the soft press of Peter's mouth against his own. And it's not quite perfect—a little off-center, a little uncoordinated in the relentless black—but it's still Peter in front of him, feeling so goddamn solid and so goddamn _real_ that Juno shuts his mind to everything but the physical facts of the moment, fisting his hands in the crisp fabric of Peter's jacket and holding him close as long as the moment might last. Doesn't care Peter's not really here, doesn't care none of this is happening, instead gives himself the gift of being allowed to believe in it.

All too soon, it's over — Nureyev easing up the pressure on Juno's mouth and letting his hands fall away and Juno forces himself to slacken his own grip, feeling the fabric folds slip through his fingers and hating that all he gets is some subconscious copy of a memory.

Then again, being with Peter only ever felt like living on borrowed time, and, really, why should he expect the world of his dreams to be any damn different?

"So unfortunately, Juno dearest," Peter says, pressing one last kiss to Juno's forehead, murmuring the next words against his skin, "I think this is where we part."

Juno knows he's right, though he's never wanted to admit anything less. Knows this moment was nothing more than a gift, and a damn undeserved one at that. And so he doesn't argue—much as the temptation sits heavy on his tongue—and doesn't fight back, and doesn't do anything more than let out a slow breath and try to fix the tactile feeling of Nureyev's mouth and hands against his skin in his memory as firmly as he can.

"Nureyev, I'm sorry," he says at last, words coming out all in a rush, needing for _someone_ to know he meant well if things should go wrong when he wakes up (and no matter how sure any plan might be, Juno knows more often than not that success or failure come down to the roll of a dice). "I'm so sorry. I just keep hurting people one after the other and I just have to think it's all _for_ something, you know? That it's all going to be worth it, and instead I feel like I just keep digging myself deeper and deeper and the last time I got in this bad, that's when you—"

"Listen, Juno," Nureyev interrupts, shushing him softly, tone somehow stern and forgiving in one. "Pull yourself together. You're about to step into that big mean world and you know you have to match its meanness if you want to survive."

And Juno does know, because it's a lesson he's been learning since he was a kid scraping his knees on the floors of their Oldtown apartment, and Pereyra's got a mean streak running deeper than the canyons of the Valles Marineris. Juno knows the kind of meanness he needs to make it, and wishes like hell that he didn't.

"I've only two suggestions before you go, and I want you to listen carefully," Nureyev continues, finding Juno's hand in the dark and interlacing their fingers like the close of a zipper. "First, in Polaris Park, nothing is as it seems—"

"But I'm not in Polaris Park."

"—and second, mind your cake on the way down."

"What—?"

"Farewell, Juno," Nureyev calls, fingers slipping loose just as Juno feels the ground giving out from under him. "And happy birthday—"     

**Author's Note:**

> anyway thanks sophie kaner and kevin vibert this scene punched me directly in my fuckin face


End file.
